Alison Garrigan In CPT's Ms. Adventures.

To punctuate the final week of Women's History Month, North Coast theater is being dazzled by an explosion that might be called gyno-nuclear. Debuting tonight is Playhouse Square's touring edition of the Oprah-produced, Oprah-ballyhooed musicalization of The Color Purple, which chronicles the epic survival of a mythically indestructible black heroine. Meanwhile, officially opening simultaneously is the Cleveland Play House's mounting of yet another in a 200-year string of stage, screen and TV adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, the masterpiece of iconic novelist Jane Austen - by any measure the literary patroness saint of indomitably independent females.

To top this, a scant 24 hours later, two more area theaters will toss further fuel on the celebratory bonfire of feminine combustion and illumination by premiering one-woman shows that salute meaningful exemplars of the gender. With additional social amplification, these solo turns also provide broadly varying, compare-and-contrast approaches to their single-sex subjects in content, focus and performers.

Actors' Summit's Golda's Balcony revives a piece that enjoyed an extensive Broadway run, touring editions and film adaptation. Conversely, Cleveland Public Theatre's Ms. Adventures, a graduate of the theater's Big [BOX] reading series, is essentially a premiere staging. Created by veteran playwright William Gibson (The Miracle Worker), the former consists solely of an extended soliloquy ascribed to the real-life Golda Meir, Israel's first and only female prime minister, intermingling her early biography with the momentous direction of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. CPT's offering, on the other hand, is local writer Mike Sepesy's imagining of the monologic musings on life, love, etc., of some 10 different, entirely fictional women.

Where the two productions coalesce, however, is that each boasts one of the area's more acclaimed and sought-after actresses. Yet even within that similarity are intriguing distinctions. Over decades, Dorothy Silver has grown into as formidable a local theatrical presence as the historic Golda she'll portray was in international politics. As administrator, director and performer (often in symbiotic collaboration with husband Reuben), she long ago achieved near legendary recognition by experiencing and surmounting every possible challenge the theater could fling her way. Thus, for her, the high-wire act of soloing - while ever risky and demanding - is not exactly new.

In contrast, though CPT's Alison Garrigan is a much employed pro with a chockful resume stretching back years, Ms. Adventures surprisingly constitutes her first one-person outing. "In fact," says Garrigan, "that contributed to the reason Mike wrote the show as a vehicle for me. While I'm pretty much constantly working, he felt the range of what I'm usually cast in didn't really reveal the variety of things I was capable of doing. Comedy, for instance. Also I'm a dialectician, so here I get the chance to explore a lot of different language patterns."

Actually, Garrigan has done several change-of-pace parts, but it's true that she's regularly cast as the strong woman and, very often, the strong man. At least once a season, it seems, she bends genders to embody such opposite-sex roles as Rocky Horror's Dr. Frank-N-Furter or Shakespeare's Cassius. She laughingly brags, "I've been called Cleveland's best-known man-woman." The refreshing aspect of her current assignment, however, is that, for probably the first and last time, Garrigan plays 10 consecutive characters, and not one of them is male.

As the actress catalogues some of the disparate females she'll strive to enliven, their variousness is certainly striking. "We have a stewardess aboard a weird flight, a fetus, a news anchor who's a harbinger of disaster, a burnt-out Joplinesque rocker, a '30s Bronx aviatrix and - my favorite - an Appalachian conjure wife.

"My mother's heritage was Southern," she recalls, "and conjure-wife tales came down to me as a girl from the women in my family. Yet, as a group," she emphasizes, "each of these characters offers a pertinent and interestingly different way of looking at females.

"I'm discovering," Garrigan confesses, "that doing a solo show is a scary proposition. Not just because, if you blow a line, there's nobody there to pick you up. But more because" - she pauses for effect - "everything is YOU!" Somehow, though, I imagine that an artist as unretiring and ballsy as this one will eventually find that idea very appealing.

Silver's involvement with variety is of a distinctly different order: how to inject some into an hour-and-half biographical monologue by a single historical character and avoid the perils of having it seem like an illustrated lecture.

Gibson's first dramatic rendering of the Golda saga was as a 1977 unsuccessful Broadway extravaganza starring Anne Bancroft and a cast of dozens. Returning in his 80s to the charismatic figure in 2002, he refashioned his conception into the present, more popular soliloquy. "I started to read the '77 original play," says Silver, "but stopped because some of the lines are in the solo version, and I didn't want to start expecting responses from all those other missing characters."

Another important choice arose from the divergence of previous Meir interpreters opting either for heavy, prosthetic-aided makeup or very little to represent Golda's most singular look. "Little," Silver decided. "A wig, some waist padding. I'm old enough now that I don't have to exaggerate. Besides, I never liked prosthetics. It always felt like I was hiding behind a mask." Similarly, the actress will only suggest Meir's mannish bray of a voice. "There, too, a little goes a long way. A steady 90 minutes of that would drive the audience crazy."

More essential to Silver is a persuasive retelling of Meir's historical drama and its still-critical meaning. In a time of great skepticism about whether a woman leader could effectively wage war, Meir was faced with making the ultimate decision to save her country by employing nuclear weapons against Egypt and Syria, which - interspersed with passages of her personal story that brought the prime minister to that moment - forms the theatrical fulcrum of Golda's Balcony. The US intervened to end the conflict, and the need to decide passed. But, as in the Cuban missile crisis, it was a very near thing.

Pertinent to how she'll portray Golda, Silver was asked if she thinks Meir would've pushed the button. "She was an old-line socialist, descended from old-line socialists," comes the answer. "She would've done anything to save Israel." So you can be sure, if the intrepid monologist has anything to say about it - as she indubitably will - a heap of that old-line socialist fervor will find its way onto the Actors' Summit stage.

Golda's Balcony: March 27-April 13, at Actors' Summit, 86 Owen Brown St., Hudson, 330.342.0800.

Ms. Adventures: March 27-April 12 at Cleveland Public Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave., 216.631.2727.